The chief justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court wants lawmakers to increase salaries for judges, clerks and non-elected Judicial Branch employees in an effort to make the positions more competitive with jobs outside the state.

Lawmakers are currently writing budgets for the state’s three branches of government amid a financial crunch spurred on by lax revenue growth and a pension crisis.

Chief Justice John Minton said the courts system is losing employees to surrounding states and other parts of state government.

Louisville lawyer John Bush is still awaiting a vote on his confirmation by President Donald Trump to be a judge on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. During hearings last month, he dodged questions dealing with controversial blog posts he penned under a pseudonym.

In a post from 2008 on the Elephants in the Bluegrass blog, Bush wrote that the landmark Supreme Court decision dealing with abortion, Roe vs. Wade, was decided by “activist judges.”

He also said that abortion was one of the nation’s “greatest tragedies”—along with slavery. In the post, Bush said both Roe vs. Wade and the Dred Scott case, which denied a black man’s right to sue for his freedom, precipitating the Civil War, relied on similar judicial reasoning.